35 34 Nuclear physics is the world of protons, neutrons, quarks and gluons, strong interactions and mass numbers, and it is a field that has an impact on our everyday lives. Scientists at the University of Brighton are at the heart of international collaborations focusing on a fundamental understanding of how the atomic building blocks of the universe were created and how they behave. Nuclear physics may be a complex and mysterious world, but the fruits of the basic science are all around us. Nuclear power generates a sixth of the UK’s electricity, MRI scanners are an everyday part of medical diagnosis, and TV archaeology would be frustratingly incomplete without radiocarbon dating. “We’re doing blue-skies academic research at the University of Brighton,” said Professor Alison Bruce, leader of the university’s Nuclear Physics Research Group. “We’re working on important building blocks of knowledge that are helping to inform the general picture of nuclear physics.” Today, nuclear physics in the UK is centred on worldwide collaborations. The University of Brighton’s nuclear physics scientists work closely with the University of Surrey, making joint use of facilities in Japan. Each university leads on certain areas, applying for ‘beam-time’ – use of facilities at other institutions – and then controlling experiments and results. Radioactive Ion Beams (RIBs) are a new direction for nuclear physics, with RIBs under construction in Germany, Japan and the US. Nuclear scientists from the UK will be working with German colleagues on a facility currently being built at Darmstadt and staff from the University of Brighton are working on the detector systems for the new centre. “We can now study in the laboratory a range of nuclear reactions that take place in exploding stars,” said Professor Bruce. “We’ll be able to understand how the chemical elements that we find on Earth were formed and distributed through the universe. RIBs use intense beams of chemical elements and ‘in-flight’ separation can provide any isotope, independently of the chemical properties of the element. The production process is fast, and that results in beams of the shortest-lived, most exotic nuclei which are the key academic focus when it comes to testing the models we have for how protons and neutrons behave in the nucleus.” The by-product is that the exotic nuclei researchers are studying are also produced in nuclear fission reactors that produce power, so, for example, an understanding of how heat is produced by the fission fragments has direct applications in areas such as how long a nuclear power reactor needs to be left to cool down before maintenance can be carried out. “Although we’re an academic research group looking at big science, we also provide an excellent training environment for our research students and staff,” said Professor Bruce, “many of whom go on to work in the nuclear power industry, helping to fill the current skills gap.” The ultimate goal of nuclear physics is to create a model that works for all nuclei in all states. A single unified description will mean that scientists have a fundamental understanding of all the forces that act on subatomic particles and will take them a big step closer to understanding the universe and the world around us. “Our principal motivation is the basic science, and we contribute strongly to the world sum of knowledge and understanding,” said Professor Bruce. “But blue-skies research in nuclear physics has the potential to tackle growing energy demands and create radical new medical therapies. We want to understand the universe, but we can contribute to a better world as we get there.” Life, Health and Physical Sciences How the universe works? Photograph: Three germanium detectors measuring the gamma-rays emitted by zirconium nuclei as they decay.
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3534
Nuclear physics is the world of protons, neutrons, quarks and gluons, strong interactions and mass numbers, and it is a field that has an impact on our everyday lives. Scientists at the University of Brighton are at the heart of international collaborations focusing on a fundamental understanding of how the atomic building blocks of the universe were created and how they behave.
Nuclear physics may be a complex and mysterious world, but the fruits of the basic science are all around us. Nuclear power generates a sixth of the UK’s electricity, MRI scanners are an everyday part of medical diagnosis, and TV archaeology would be frustratingly incomplete without radiocarbon dating.
“We’re doing blue-skies academic research at the University of Brighton,” said Professor Alison Bruce, leader of the university’s Nuclear Physics Research Group. “We’re working on important building blocks of knowledge that are helping to inform the general picture of nuclear physics.”
Today, nuclear physics in the UK is centred on worldwide collaborations. The University of Brighton’s nuclear physics scientists work closely with the University of Surrey, making joint use of facilities in Japan. Each university leads on certain areas, applying for ‘beam-time’ – use of facilities at other institutions – and then controlling experiments and results.
Radioactive Ion Beams (RIBs) are a new direction for nuclear physics, with RIBs under construction in Germany, Japan and the US. Nuclear scientists from the UK will be working with German colleagues on a facility currently being built at Darmstadt and staff from the University of Brighton are working on the detector systems for the new centre.
“We can now study in the laboratory a range of nuclear reactions that take place in exploding stars,” said Professor Bruce. “We’ll be able to understand how the chemical elements that we find on Earth were formed and distributed through the universe. RIBs use intense beams of chemical elements and ‘in-flight’ separation can provide any isotope, independently of the chemical properties of the element. The production process is fast, and that results in beams of the shortest-lived, most exotic nuclei which are the key academic focus when it comes to testing the models we have for how protons and neutrons behave in the nucleus.”
The by-product is that the exotic nuclei researchers are studying are also produced in nuclear fission reactors that produce power, so, for example, an understanding of how heat is produced by the fission fragments has direct applications in areas such as how long a nuclear power reactor needs to be left to cool down before maintenance can be carried out. “Although we’re an academic research group looking at big science, we also provide an excellent training environment for our research students and staff,” said Professor Bruce, “many of whom go on to work in the nuclear power industry, helping to fill the current skills gap.”
The ultimate goal of nuclear physics is to create a model that works for all nuclei in all states. A single unified description will mean that scientists have a fundamental understanding of all the forces that act on subatomic particles and will take them a big step closer to understanding the universe and the world around us.
“Our principal motivation is the basic science, and we contribute strongly to the world sum of knowledge and understanding,” said Professor Bruce. “But blue-skies research in nuclear physics has the potential to tackle growing energy demands and create radical new medical therapies. We want to understand the universe, but we can contribute to a better world as we get there.”
Life, Health and Physical Sciences
How the universe works?
Photograph: Three germanium detectors measuring the gamma-rays emitted by zirconium nuclei as they decay.
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